This Monday night, Andrew Zimmern launches the 100th episode of his Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel, and this time he visits America's most bizarre city, Las Vegas. The promo videos show him talking about sustainability in the desert, visiting Sweet Surrender Cupcake for its $750 cupcake (topped with 1 1/2 ounces of Louis XIII cognac), eating Thai food at Lotus of Siam, and heading to a pig farm where the pigs eat the truly disgusting food garbage from the casino restaurants (Zimmern does not sample it).

Since this will be the seventh season of the kind of show that in TV usually has, maybe, three good years, it seems a good time to ask Zimmern if the new episodes will be different from all those others, in which he ate things only aborigines who have never seen a chicken would eat. I recently spoke to him on the phone about that and a couple other things.

ANDREW ZIMMERN: New? Who knows? After five years and 100 episodes mostly outside the country, we kept finding incredible things to come back to in the U.S. The shows are driven by stories. We're trying to show some of the most complex ideas and adapted versions of different ethnic food cultures around the world. But the staggering popularity of the stateside shows has made us do more here.

JM: Why do you think the show has gone on for as long as it has?

AZ: I think it's two things: In America, we're such a disposable culture. We get into things right away, then just get rid of them. I think our show's popularity is in showing different aspects of the same obsession in looking at new things. Food is great, but food with a story is even better. Especially when people have never heard the story. We find foods on the fringes, but then tell tales about cultures we know and love. If we go to New Orleans, one of the great food cities of the world, we tell stories of the city that haven't been seen before. One of my favorite episodes was in Los Angeles, where we opened a pop-up restaurant. That allowed us to tell stories of L.A. through the city's markets and chefs. I wanted to understand the city foodwise right at that moment. I'd go into the kitchen at Animal and find out what their customers like to eat and why. It told the new food story in L.A. Then I called old-fart chef-friends and had them come over.

JM: So, is the new series different?

AZ: The show has and hasn't diverged, really — it's more a maturation. We knew with every episode that it wasn't necessarily what was really crazy and horrendous that I put in my mouth. It was the story of the people who ate these things. We weren't setting out to do Fear Factor. People are interested in the deeper story.

JM: But the show is called Bizarre Foods, and most of the time it shows you eating stuff you pull out from under a rotted stump.

AZ: True, and when we shot the whole first season, before it aired, we called around and told people the name of the show, and that didn't go over so well in some of those countries. But we tried to explain that bizarre also means strange, exotic.

AZ: Well, I'm committed to doing another year. I have some specials for the Travel Channel. I have a kid's book coming out — I'm very excited about it. I wanted to recreate the magic in my living room by going through books lying around the house. I took 50 of the strangest foods I could think of. In the brains chapter, I show how French and other cultures eat brains, then I segue into zombies and why they eat brains, and then to an essay on the world's smartest people. One idea leads to another. Lots of illustrations. I've also relaunched the Web site with Toyota. More public-speaking than ever with my charities. I'm a father and like to make a difference every day.